Essays from "The Theosophical Path" by
Talbot Mundy

Another's Duty Is Full of Danger

By Talbot Mundy

July 1924

Duty and danger are words whose stark significance is nowadays
obscured by misuse. Yes and no, however, are the only words in
any language that are more exactly definite or which, if used
with true intention, are the keys to more perplexing riddles.
One of our many modern troubles, that should be one of the easiest
to overcome, is that we use words much too vaguely and divorce
them from their real meaning by admitting reservations and equivocations
that lead off into endless byways of perplexity.

Duty is that which is due, and there is no escape from it, although
the ways are limitless by which we may deceive ourselves, and
others, with a temporary, false sensation of escape. But that
is because we are all too prone to overlook the fact that all
life is eternal, and that death provides no 'alibi' or refuge
from the inexorable law, that as we sow, we reap. The Higher Law,
that actually governs us, is neither limited nor qualified by
time; its range is the eternal Now, and though each succeeding
minute may provide new opportunities for progress, neither minutes
nor aeons affect the Law, which is, and was, and forever will
be the sole arbiter of individual and of collective destiny.

When a bill is due, we have to pay it; the alternatives are an
appeal to the more or less elastic patience of the creditor, or
bankruptcy. The first postpones the day of reckoning but is often
costly in accruing interest; the other compels us to relinquish
all our assets, and to begin again from the beginning, without
credit and without the benefit of such momentum as a business-in-being
normally provides. In either event, there is nothing gained beyond
a breathing-spell; and the only sure way in which a bankrupt can
regain his credit is by making use of opportunity to settle with
his creditors to their satisfaction.

That is no more than a simple illustration of the occult law,
that what is due eventually must be paid; with interest, if we
delay the payment; with increased difficulty and without the assistance
of reserved resources, if we delay too long, or if we are caught
deliberately trying to evade a settlement.

A very common cause of bankruptcy is signing other people's notes:
that is, guaranteeing that another individual shall pay his debts.
That individual defaults -- and does so the more readily because
his sense of responsibility has been weakened by what may have
been intended by the guarantor simply as an act of friendship
-- the guarantor is called on to fulfill his guarantee; he finds
it impossible, fails, and the law takes its course. He then joins
the host of hurt and disappointed good-intention-mongers, who
chant the dirge the ages have all listened to (so often that the
'recording angel' must have more than plenty of that gramophonic
bleat in store) -- "Never, no never again!"

But he will do it again. He will do it, in some form or other,
the first moment that the risk looks profitable. Nothing less
than wisdom, that has so grown from within that it has become
identified with the individual, will save him from forever trying
the impossible; and, in the end, he is better off should his attempts
to avoid the law of individual responsibility meet disaster at
the outset; because 'nothing succeeds like success' in convincing
a man that his mistakes are wise, and the longer he seems able
to avoid the law without distress to himself, the harder it will
be for him to learn when the inevitable consequence begins to
function, and the greater the distress will be. Failure in the
early stages of an error is good fortune in disguise.

That is only an example on the most objective plane, where it
is easiest to understand it. The Law, that as we sow we reap,
is universal; it is everywhere, and it applies to everything and
to everybody. It governs all the consequences of the most elusive
and abstract thinking, as well as the effect of a blow struck
in anger and the mixing of selected chemicals. Cause and effect
are one, and they cannot be separated, although time, which is
the mother of delusions, frequently persuades us that they can
be.

Every individual is finally and unavoidably responsible for his
own acts. Being causes, they set up consequences, that in turn
become causes and bring endless chains of consequences in their
wake; and for every one of those the originator must inevitably
answer, at some time, in some place. It becomes easy to realize
that the conditions we must meet in future lives depend entirely
on performances in this life and the lives behind us, although
no human brain can understand more than a fraction of the intricacies
and adjustments of the Law of Karma.

A little thinking -- a little facing of the facts without seeking
to force them to fit time-rooted prejudices -- brings to the surface
the delightfully contenting knowledge that our problems are our
own; that we have nobody to blame except ourselves, and no acts
but our own to answer for, in the ultimate analysis. Hundreds
of thousands -- millions -- of people have dimly realized that
fact, and have sought to apply it; but, because they have only
dimly realized one aspect of it, they have fallen headlong into
selfishness, assuring themselves that the Law reads 'I come first.'

But whoever adopts that policy of selfishness will find himself
degraded to a plane of consciousness on which, in self-defense,
all others will be quite as selfish as himself; just as he who
adopts a policy of unselfish usefulness will eventually find himself
promoted to a plane on which his fellow-men will act unselfishly
toward him. Nor are these far-away planes, to be reached in future
incarnations or avoided by some superstitious supplications to
an 'unknown God.' They are nearer than breathing; they are closer
than hands and feet. They are here, immediately ready, and as
easy to attain to, or to tumble down into, as a cold bath or the
measles.

So a selfish policy is not the remedy for any process of unwisdom.
Like creating like, and action bringing its exactly measured consequences
to the doer, it is clear, when we have once been bold enough to
face facts, that we cannot help anyone by trying to help him to
do the impossible: that is to say, by trying to help him to succeed
in error or to avoid the consequences to himself of his own unwisdom.
In that respect we have enough to do to keep our own course straight
amid the massed perplexities our own unwisdom has produced. If
we associate ourselves with his unwisdom we become identified
with it and, however self-righteously contenting the emotion that
impels us, all that we succeed in doing is to add to the amount
of trouble in the world, of which there is already quite enough
without our interference.

Our business is to reduce the amount of trouble; and
there is one royal way, but only one, in which that possibly may
be accomplished. All other ways are vanity and a delusion.

A simple illustration will suggest the real process and convey
a hint of its infallibility: suppose a fleet of ships to be sailing
toward one destination. Some of them are keeping a correct course;
others are diverging toward rocks and shoals, with which the course
is limited on both sides. There is an adverse current, but each
ship has sufficient power, and a little over, to force itself
against the wind and tide; each is supplied with charts and is
in charge of a navigator, whose duty is to bring his ship to port.

What would happen if the ships that are on the proper course should
diverge from it in order to head the others in the right direction?
Or if they should stop their engines and lose headway in order
that their captains might argue the point with the other captains
who were heading for the shoals? The probability of disaster,
of course, would simply be increased, and nobody would be the
gainer by it.

On the other hand, suppose that the captains who were on the proper
course, and who knew they were, having taken all the
seamanlike precautions, should call attention to the direction
they were taking and should 'carry on,' they would be doing their
full duty, by giving clear warning of the danger to the others,
and by showing the course where safety lay.

Life is not so different from that, that we cannot profit by the
illustration. There are, of course, and for instance, schoolmasters
whose duty is to go long ways, and drastically now and then, in
interference with the navigation of the frail barks with which
the young begin life's journey; but even they find that example
is the most efficient remedy for error, and that constant fault-finding
not only deadens the beginner's alertness but deprives him of
capacity for self-direction. They do not find it profitable to
do a pupil's duty for him.

And there are extremes to which unselfishness may rightly go in
rescuing those who have met disaster, provided that it truly is
unselfishness and not self-righteousness, or a craving for self-advertisement,
or the prospect of possible reward that gives the impulse. There
are men and women whose very presence in the world uplifts it,
so endowed by Nature with compassion for all suffering and all
hopelessness that it becomes their duty to plunge into the stream
of events and make other people's business theirs. Such was H.
P. Blavatsky. But then that quality of true compassion that possessed
her, had its natural corollary of wisdom, so that she could do
the right thing, at the right time, in the right place. Wisdom
provided foresight, and she knew full well what consequences her
brave altruism would inevitably bring down on herself; and, aware
in advance of the slander and the persecution that would be her
lot, she took her course deliberately, gallantly, surrendering
her own peace for a lifetime solely that the coming generations
might be benefited.

Privileges such as hers were must be earned; and they cannot be
earned by talking, or by meddling with other people's duty. No
man knows how many lives were spent by H. P. Blavatsky in mastering
the measureless experience that made her fit to undertake the
work she did. And no man knows the tenth of what she suffered
in one lifetime, which she might have lived at ease, in enjoyment
of wealth and an unchallenged reputation. Neither is it possible
for anyone to measure her reward, because those who are incapable
of doing what she did are equally incapable of guessing at the
heights she climbed by the unsparing use of all her spiritual
gifts. Those who work for reward are not those who receive it,
because its nature is beyond their comprehension; all the higher
spheres of influence are kept for those who do not seek them,
but who strive to serve in order that they may learn to serve
more usefully.

Service does not consist in doing other people's duty for them,
but in so well finishing one's own that there is nothing of it
left to burden others; in such painstaking exercise of self-control
that not a creature can be injured by our lapses; in such alert
and patient progress on the narrow way that leads between ambition
and neglect, that we may lead no fellow-pilgrim off the Path.
For it is very much less harmful in the long run to ourselves,
to bring disaster on ourselves, than to imperil others.

Danger is a grim word, fraught with meaning. The danger in another's
duty is as grim and sure as that which we know we run if we neglect
our own. The fact is, that we cannot do another's duty and our
own as well, and the attempt to prove the contrary entails neglect
and oversight, which are the source of half our difficulties and
of most of our delay along the Path of Evolution. The desire to
do another's duty very often is a masked form of intolerance or
pride; as often, it conceals a mean scorn for another's weakness;
sometimes, it is tyranny, grimacing in the cloak of kindness.
It is never quite unselfish for at best it robs another of an
opportunity.

The weird, illogical, and blind belief that one short life is
all there is of us, is a delusion, under which in one form or
another all the nations of the world succumb to hopelessness,
or struggle onward in a false hope that some whim of an incomprehensible
Destiny may show them a life better worth the living after death
shall have imposed the final irony on this one.

Stultified by this delusion and obsessed by the impossible ambition
to compress Eternity's whole panorama into one short earth-life,
men grow mad, ascribing all their own discomfort to their fellow-men's
iniquity. They seek to make themselves more comfortable by controlling
and compelling others. They quote what have been said to be the
words of Jesus -- "Do unto others as ye would that others
should do unto you "; but they neglect to bear in mind that
other equally profound and simple caution -- "Let your light
so shine that they may see your good works." Duty,
in this age and generation, has become a synonym for making other
men do what we ignorantly think is theirs, in order that we may
feel self-righteous, or may live more lazily, or possibly that
we may get to heaven on the wings of other men's behavior.

It is impossible for anyone to understand another's duty, let
alone to do it. Before we can qualify to sit in judgment of a
fellow-man's neglect, or of his ignorance, or of his ill-will,
we must first attain to the ability to see the whole of the procession
of preceding lives that he has lived, and then so wisely weigh
the interlacing causes and effects of myriads of years that not
a single one escapes us.

A sneer at that statement is about the only recourse left to those
who cling to the delusion named above that has brought the world
to its present pass. But the sneer will not answer the charge
that whoever sits in judgment on a fellow-man, or dares to try
to do another's duty, or who makes claim to be better than his
fellow, mocks himself and makes himself ridiculous; for either
he asserts impossible ability to see the whole procession of past
lives, and boasts of sufficient wisdom to review and weigh them
all, or else he impudently claims to judge without the facts which
hardly the most arbitrary God invented by the stupidest of men
would think of doing!

Let him who knows exactly whence he came, and whither he is going,
and can prove it, pass such judgments as he sees fit; let him
do another's duty if he has the time. For the rest of us, who
recognise this life as but an interlude between eternities, in
which an endless chain of lives supplies us with the changing
circumstance and the environment we need in which to work out
our own spiritual progress, there is only just exactly time enough
to attain our own self-mastery, and no time at all to spare for
criticizing others.

To attempt to do another's duty is an act of criticism. It implies
an assertion of omniscience. It is an arrogant and ignorant concession
to the self-esteem that flatters us that we are better than our
neighbor, and more wise. Carried to its ultimate, it leads to
a confusion of responsibility. The seeds of war are sown when
any nation starts to interfere with the duty or the privileges
of another; none will gainsay that. But we are prone to overlook
the fact that nations are but congeries of individuals, and that
the same eternal Laws apply to all of us.

In one sense, and in only one, are we responsible for our neighbor's
duty. He has his rights, and they are neither more nor less than
ours. It follows that our duty toward him includes our giving
him full room and opportunity to attend to his own affairs, while
we attend to our own so thoroughly as not to interfere with him
and not to leave neglected details for him to clean up after us.

There is an everyday expression which betrays the common attitude
toward life and its problems and lays bare the roots of the ridiculous
philosophy with which the greater part of what we call the civilized
world today endeavors to console itself. "Life is too short
for that!" We have all heard it. Most of us have used the
phrase at one time or another. But the truth is, Life is too long
for anything but strict attention to our duty and a generous permission
to the other man to do his.

If all we had to live was one life -- three score years and ten
-- there might be something in the theory that life is much too
short for anything except enjoyment; and that if another does
not do his duty, then we may do it for him in order to enjoy immediate
comfort of mind or body. But even the Psalmist, who sang of three
score years and ten, sang also that "a thousand years are
but a moment." Life is so long -- so eternally, incalculably
long -- that there is time for every act, however apparently insignificant,
to reach its full fruition; and there is time for us to meet --
to be compelled to meet and be compelled to deal with -- all the
consequences of the acts that we ourselves commit.

We see around us all the evidence of rebirth, ceaselessly progressing.
There are sermons in the stones, and running brooks, and trees.
The very nestling, newly hatched, knows whence to expect its food.
The tree knows how to grow as soon as it bursts forth in darkness
from the seed. Who taught it? Where did it learn the trick of
thrusting upward to the light, and how does it know the light
is there? Ourselves, possessed of habits that were never taught
us since we came adventuring into this short span of years between
a cradle and the grave, live, move, and have our being amid circumstances
and conditions that we know intuitively how to deal with. Is it
possible, or by any thinking mind conceivable, that we could conduct
ourselves as men and women without accumulated stores of past
experience on which to base our judgment of events as they arise?
It is insanity to base our estimate of life and its recurrent
problems on the proofless, blind assumption that we have but one
short earth-life in which to make our whole experience.

What then is the danger in another's duty? This: that every injustice
brings its retribution on the perpetrator. It is not just to deprive
another of the opportunity to work out his experience. And it
is unjust to ourselves to rob ourselves by interfering with another,
thus misusing time and opportunity that might have been applied
to our own problem. So to do another's duty entails two injustices,
and we will have to meet the consequence of both, at some time
or another, in this earth-life or another, and then we will have
to devote both time and energy to the solution of a difficulty
that would certainly have been avoided had we sooner learned the
art and the necessity of minding our own business.

Minding our own business is the all-important principle of living.
We are what we are -- a nuisance to our neighbors very often,
and a danger and obstruction to ourselves. It is becoming what
we can become that is our duty to our fellow-man; and by becoming
better than we are, and better able, from constant practice, to
mind our own business wisely, we can become of increasing benefit
to ourselves, our neighbor, our nation, the world, and the universe.
By trying to do others' duty, we can only go from bad to worse.

Duty is that which is due -- not that which we think, perhaps,
may possibly be due before long. Duty, like ourselves, exists
in the eternal Now. It is at hand, immediate, in front of us,
invariably simple; and it sometimes takes the form of opportunity
to learn a little self-control by refraining in thought or word
or deed from interference with another.

It must be clear to the most immature human intelligence that
no man can be helpful, or anything except a burden to his fellows,
until he has acquired the art of orderly self-government. It follows,
that our first duty at all times and in any set of circumstances
is to control ourselves and so make sure that, whatever else,
at all events we do not add to the inharmony around us. It sometimes
happens then, although not nearly so often as our vanity would
like to persuade us, that after we have exercised our utmost self-control,
so giving wisdom opportunity to function, there is just a little
surplus left that we may safely offer to the other fellow; but
even so, the wisdom born of self-control, will oblige us to make
the offer very diffidently. Wisdom will remind us that we are
ignorant of many of the facts, and possibly of nearly all of them.

Briefly, our whole duty to our neighbor may be summed up in one
sentence of four words: "Mind your own business." Business
is that which ought to keep us busy, even if it does not. If it
does not, then our duty is to find out why, and to remedy the
failure by giving business more strict attention. That which ought
to keep us busy is the instant and unceasing task of learning
how to regulate and improve our own character, forever watchful
of results as evidenced by deeds, and to the one end that we may
become more useful by becoming more spiritual.

The only influence that we should dare to exercise is that which
comes from spiritual progress. And that is automatic.
It requires no exercise of brain, and no self-assertion to exert
the uplifting beneficence of spirituality. In fact, on the contrary,
self-assertion is a gross impediment that not only makes us stumble
in our effort but assumes far greater proportions, in the eyes
of the beholder, than those spiritual qualities that we propose
to advertise. There is nothing more insulting to one's neighbor
or more stultifying to oneself than conduct based on a self-flattering
claim of spiritual superiority. The moment that we feel ourselves
superior to others is the time, of all others, when we most need
self-control -- and then self-criticism -- and then drastic self-direction,
bearing well in mind that there are countless future lives in
which to meet in full the consequences of the positive and negative
commissions and omissions made in this one.

The conclusion of it all is this: that we are here to learn, not
how to do our neighbor's duty, but to do our own -- not for our
own advantage, but for that of others. The only real blessing
we can offer to our fellow-men is self-improvement, to the end
that we may not increase inharmony but may exercise an honest,
pure, uplifting influence. The basis of all spiritual progress
is in self-examination and self-watchfulness. The proof of it
consists in deeds that do no injury, depriving no man of his right
to equal room and unhampered liberty along the Path of Progress.